“At Red Hat, We Look For People Who Use Learning To Benefit Community”

Open Source is the catalyst for most innovations happening in today’s digital world. With emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and internet of things (IoT) and blockchain merging with Open Source solutions, there are a lot of career development opportunities and Open Source jobs that open up for developers and engineers.

With Red Hat being a pioneer in the Open Source space, Ameeta Roy, Director, Solution Architecture at Red Hat India and South Asia shares her inputs on the hiring trends, the developer programs, and academic partnership programs by Red Hat that help to build a stronger developer community to Ankita KS from EFY Group. She also talks about trends, challenges, technologies in the Open Source World. Excerpts follow….

Q: Can you tell us what are some of the latest technologies that have the potential to transform the Open Source industry in the near future?

Enterprises’ journey of migration from monolith to microservices is an exciting trend in the Open Source environment. Containers and Kubernetes play a key role in enabling this migration with Linux underpinning Kubernetes. Automation is another interesting trend gaining traction in the industry. Fueled by enterprise DevOps adoption, the automation of software delivery and infrastructure changes give developers the freedom to concentrate on coding without worrying about infrastructure agility, scalability, etc. The other trend I see gaining momentum is the concept of a service mesh. This is essentially platform-level automation for creating the network connectivity required by microservices-based software architectures.

Q: How has Open Source evolved to become the new norm for Indian enterprises, especially with technologies like AI, ML, IoT increasingly coming into play?

Enterprise IT environments require a lot of investment and planning, as they need IT infrastructure that delivers speed, scalability, flexibility and faster innovation that helps the business flourish. Open Source provides all this, along with a much-needed predictable life cycle. It combines the best of two worlds — the advantages of Open Source with the stability, performance, and support that is offered by enterprise software essentially making Open Source the new norm for enterprises.

Today, the industry is witnessing projects that are trying to make AI and ML more accessible to software developers. Take the case of Kubeflow, an ML toolkit for Kubernetes. The idea behind Kubeflow is to make it simple to scale machine learning models and deploy them to production wherever Kubernetes is running. Once again, we see Kubernetes becoming the target platform of choice.

Q: What are the new trends in the Indian developer community today?

Developers around the world continue to have a keen inclination towards Open Source as an open code gives them a deeper understanding of the technology and helps them in contributing to the community while increasing cost-effectiveness and efficiency at the same time. They also want to keep themselves abreast of the latest technologies such as AI, ML, blockchain, etc. Python, Javascript, PHP, C, C++ are still some of the programming languages with the highest demand and uptake. Developers are also foraying into containerization, the entire Dockers and Kubernetes ecosystem and serverless microservices.

We have a program called Red Hat Developer program is built for developers, by developers. It provides access to software, tools, guides, and resources to make their job and daily work easier. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Middleware available through the program at no cost, developers can more easily use our technology to start projects and explore solutions while having confidence that their chosen development platforms and tools can be supported in production, without porting or incompatibility issues. To know more about the developer program, here is the link:https://developers.redhat.com/

Q: What are the skill sets that are required for a developer to get hired in an open source company like Red Hat? If you were to hire developers, what are the skill sets that you look at?

The pillars of Open Source are community, transparency, and collaboration. Therefore, to work in an open environment, it is important to possess in-depth technical knowledge, good communication skills, a problem-solving attitude and passion for innovation. Especially in Open Source development, developers need to articulate what they want to build, how they are building it, and how and why they have changed the existing code. This means writing clear, detailed documentation for their programs, as well as being able to talk through projects to peers, either in person or over email. We, at Red Hat, look for people who are open to learning new things and willing to use that learning in a manner that is beneficial to the community because that is the open source way.

Q: Could you please brief about the academia partnership programs conducted by Red Hat and what are some of the certifications offered?

Open Source solutions are core to innovation in areas like cloud computing, containers, mobile, AI, ML and beyond. By bringing Red Hat Academy and training on Red Hat’s Open Source solutions to students, Red Hat, and our partner institutions/universities are aiming to equip a future workforce in India with in-demand skills.

We at Red Hat strongly believe in the power of participation and innovation through collaboration. We highly value our community and these partnerships help us train individuals and inculcate in them our organizations’ DNA that in the long run helps us with a readily available talent pool familiar with the Red Hat solutions and services. The training allows the young students and budding developers to be fully equipped to deal with the concerns in Open Source and get ready for Open Source Jobs. Red Hat focuses on training delivery through several means including brick and mortar instructor-led classroom model, instructor-led virtual training, self-paced online learning, and video classrooms. Red Hat Learning Subscription which encompasses the self-paced online learning with video classrooms, virtual labs along with a year-long access to content, videos and 400 hours of practice labs is considered as a phenomenal method of learning.

Red Hat Academy’s core curriculum consists of system administration and system engineering on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, besides Red Hat JBoss middleware administration and introductory Red Hat OpenStack (cloud) content. Red Hat provides technical training in these areas to the Red Hat Academy faculty at Institutions participating in the Academy Program. These courses are global and are provided in 35 locations across North America and 85 locations worldwide with the same content and quality no matter where one is. The instructors are deployed through Red Hat Certified Training Partners for these courses and are all experienced Red Hat Certified Professionals who are intimately familiar with course curriculum and know the trends and the requirements for Open Source jobs. To know more about the academic partnership programs, here is the link: https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/red-hat-academy

Q: Over the years, what are the mantras that you have learned about motivating young engineers who look for Open Source jobs?

Young engineers today are at the brink of emerging tech and Open Source and should take their time to understand these current trends in the associated space. It is also important for senior leaders to guide them and help them figure out where they should place their skills. Additionally, including people in key product and management decisions makes them feel valued. Being involved in the design and planning process pushes them to create higher quality products. It is also absolutely essential to ensure that while working with young energetic engineers, plans are not only realistic in terms of being executable but also challenging enough to keep them motivated to excel.

Q: What are the challenges developers face when it comes to deploying applications on the cloud and how is Red Hat helping them overcome these challenges?

To meet evolving business demands, IT organizations are looking to new workloads, AI, ML and IoT to drive competitive advantages in crowded marketplaces. As a result, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are becoming the preferred architecture for enterprises. However, developers face several challenges while making an app cloud-native. The most important challenge to consider is interoperability and support issues while migrating services from one cloud provider to another.

For more than 15 years, Red Hat has helped enterprises innovate on Linux, first in their datacenters and now across the hybrid cloud via Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 8). For any workload running on any environment, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 delivers one enterprise Linux experience to meet the unique technology needs of evolving enterprises. It delivers the innovative muscle along with a hardened code base, extensive security updates, award-winning support and a vast ecosystem of tested and validated supporting technologies. It offers several benefits to developers:

Simplifies application development – with less setup and config effort, you can more quickly get to writing code.

Is for traditional and cloud/container applications with many new tools for both

Offers dozens of tools to build and test applications.

Q: What is Red Hat’s roadmap to drive Open Source innovation?

We firmly believe Open Source unlocks the world’s potential. Even our customers value the Open Source ethos of transparency, community, and collaboration, and we help them consume the innovation of open source-developed software. Through the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, we are bringing this knowledge and experience directly to our customers. The lab can be in a residency-style, virtual or pop-up setting, where Red Hat consultants, engineers and subject matter experts collaborate and work closely with customers to modernize existing applications or create new ones with Open Source and DevOps. We drive Open Source innovation not just among enterprises but among the developer community too.